The Libyan Attorney General Al-Siddiq Al-Sour said that many of the laws recently issued by the House of Representatives (HoR) were issued without study or research, such as the anti-terrorism and cybercrime laws and the law fighting witchcraft and sorcery.
Al-Sour's remarks came in his speech on Tuesday during the International Scientific Conference on the Criminal Justice System, where he said that his office had noticed that there were crisis laws issued by the HoR to meet urgent needs or to satisfy public opinion or part of it.
"These laws are issued and in most cases they have flaws or shortcomings... either harsh penalties, a violation of freedoms, or an expansion of police powers. These laws were based on the concept of protecting public order and neglected the necessity of protecting values and interests.” He explained.
He said the penal code, as a regulator of social behavior, must be derived from the values and interests rooted in the living conscience of society. He also called for the use of innovative scientific research in order to develop the penal and criminal procedure laws that revolve around criminal legislation.
"Criminal justice research must focus on the concepts of legitimacy, accountability, and effectiveness to verify the extent to which systems, interventions, and punishments have intended or unintended effects, and the idea of the conference is to pave the way for researchers who aspire to contribute to the quality of criminal justice based on the quality of research.” Al-Sour indicated.
It is noteworthy that the HoR has issued a package of laws that observers describe as absurd, the most important of which are the two laws that the Attorney General has cited as a guide in his speech: the law on combating terrorism and cybercrime and the law on limiting witchcraft and sorcery.
The first law was criticized by local and international human rights organizations and was met with a disapproving campaign.
They also described the law on witchcraft and sorcery as broad and unspecified, and that it was taken to satisfy certain classes of people who had called for the enactment of such laws, knowing that some people in Libya described it as a reactionary law that took the country backward to the Middle Ages.
